Caught In the Light Read online

  ‘You’re not sorry.’

  We stopped there, beneath Neptune and his frozen fountain, and turned to look at each other. Until that moment, we hadn’t so much as touched. ‘What’s happening?’ Marian murmured.

  ‘Something that’s never happened to me before.’

  ‘Nor me.’

  We were breathless now, expectant yet apprehensive. Then we were kissing: her lips against mine, her tongue, her nose and cheek, the butterfly flicker of her eyelashes, the warmth of her breath, the leather of her glove cool against my neck.

  She broke away and stared at me, as if terrified, then headed along the path that led round the fountain and up to the glade of fir trees beyond, glancing back to see me following, moving faster, almost running.

  I caught up as she entered the screen of trees behind the nearest of Neptune’s Tritons. We kissed again. Snowflakes shaken from the branches around us dampened her face as she arched back across the parapet, yielding or still resisting, there was no way to be sure. But there was no way to stop, either.

  ‘Let’s go back to my hotel,’ Marian whispered. ‘Now.’

  ‘Where are you staying?’

  ‘The Imperial.’

  ‘The best, so they tell me.’

  ‘Come and find out.’

  ‘Talk to me about something,’ she said, staring into my eyes as the taxi sped us back through the city. ‘Anything.’

  ‘I can’t think of anything.’

  ‘Tell me about your work.’

  ‘I just take pictures.’

  ‘Is there one photographer you particularly admire?’

  ‘None living.’

  ‘Dead, then?’

  ‘Roger Fenton, maybe.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He was the very first war photographer. In the Crimea. He had to work it all out from first principles, but he still managed to come close to something like art. And his landscapes … But you don’t want to hear this.’

  ‘I don’t want to think, either. Keep talking. Was he successful, this Fenton?’

  ‘Very.’

  ‘Healthy, wealthy and wise?’

  ‘Hard to say. He was the most famous photographer of his generation. But he gave it all up when he was still a relatively young man. Sold his equipment and negatives. Packed it in.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Nobody knows.’

  ‘But you have a theory?’

  ‘For what it’s worth.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘I think he realized he’d done his best work. That it was only going to be downhill from there. So, he quit.’

  ‘That must have taken a lot of courage.’

  ‘Or despair.’

  ‘Or temptation,’ she countered.

  ‘What was there to tempt him?’

  ‘The unknown.’ She twined her fingers in mine. ‘The place you most want to go. For all the risks attached.’

  Marian had a suite on the first floor of the hotel: an opulently furnished pair of rooms looking down onto the street through high, thick-curtained windows. The door closed solidly behind us and she turned a switch to lower the shutters, filtering and thinning the grey winter light. It was warm and silent. The imminence of passion – of heat and flesh and broken taboos – hung almost tangibly in the air.

  ‘This must be expensive,’ I said.

  She shrugged. ‘My husband’s paying. He likes me to spend his money.’

  ‘Won’t we pay, too – in the end?’

  ‘Maybe. But first …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘We can have what we’ll pay for. And make sure it’s worth the price.’

  She took off her coat and gloves. We kissed slowly and lingeringly, knowing this time that we wouldn’t stop. The madness of it was part of the pleasure. I didn’t know her and she didn’t know me. But nothing was going to be held back. Already, I sensed it was going to be better than it had ever been before, her desire fitting mine like the skintight leather she’d just peeled from her fingers.

  And it came so close. As close to perfection as I could dream of it being. Morning drifted into afternoon as we surrendered to each other, at first with clumsy eagerness, then in subtle variations on a theme that always had the same savoured ending. So much released and discovered, about the mind as well as the body. What we were capable of. What we couldn’t have admitted to any but the strangers we were even then ceasing to be. Each climax found and surpassed a new limit. By the end there were no inhibitions left. We’d been shocked into a drained and exhausted tenderness.

  ‘You can’t photograph that, can you, Ian?’ she said as we lay on the bed, still warm from the heat of all we’d done. ‘You can’t capture it in any picture.’

  ‘I wouldn’t want to.’

  ‘Then what do you want?’

  ‘You’ve already found that out.’

  ‘Tell me anyway.’

  ‘I want you.’

  ‘Well, you’ve got me now.’

  ‘But I can’t keep you.’

  ‘That’s lucky for you, isn’t it? You can fuck me and forget me. Most men would envy you.’

  ‘I’m not most men.’

  ‘I noticed.’

  ‘And I’m not very good at forgetting.’

  ‘Well … you have to have some weakness, I suppose.’ I refused to laugh. ‘What’s yours?’

  ‘Strangely enough …’ She smiled. ‘The same.’

  It wasn’t the first time I’d been unfaithful to my wife. It wasn’t even the second. But, still, I’d never known or done anything like it before. The intensity of the experience was bewildering. Already the question wasn’t whether it would be repeated, but whether I could even bear the thought of it not being repeated.

  I stayed at the Imperial that night, returning to the Europa only briefly to pick up a change of clothes. We dined in the hotel’s grand luxe restaurant. Marian wore a black dress that looked as if it had been made for her by a top designer, but no jewellery and very little makeup. My mind’s eye kept flashing back to just a few hours before. I tasted her rather than the wine and relished the recency of the memory.

  ‘What are we going to do, Ian? I don’t mean tonight. I mean …’

  ‘Eventually.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I don’t know. You have a husband. I have a wife. And a daughter.’

  ‘You didn’t mention her before.’

  ‘She’s fourteen. It’s not as if …’

  ‘I have no children.’

  ‘The truth is, Marian, we hardly know the first thing about each other.’

  ‘But you’ve realized already, haven’t you?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That what we do know is all that matters.’

  ‘I know I’ve never felt like this before. Never felt so much so soon.’

  ‘Neither have I.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s a chance in a million.’

  ‘Then we should make the most of it.’

  ‘And to hell with the consequences?’

  ‘Just now, consequences don’t seem to matter.’

  ‘Liberating, isn’t it?’

  ‘It could get to be a habit.’

  ‘Yes. I know exactly what you mean. A habit you can’t kick.’

  ‘For the moment, I don’t even want to try.’

  We went back to her suite long before we’d eaten or drunk enough to slake our appetites. The chambermaid had pulled the mirror-panelled doors across between the two rooms. We watched our reflections in them as I unzipped her dress and slid the flimsy layers of silk from her body and pulled her down onto the thick-piled carpet, in the lamplight’s glow. The sustained urgency of our lovemaking was alarming me now. Already, it was certain my life had changed. But what had it changed to? As Marian had unwittingly predicted, the temptation to find out was irresistible. But it was also frightening.

  We fell into bed and a pit of slumber. I woke from it as if I’d only had my eyes closed for a few minutes, though it
must by then have been the early hours of the morning. Marian was still asleep, but mumbling to herself, breathing heavily and tossing her head on the pillow, as if trying to throw off some stifling weight.

  ‘I won’t let you do this, Jos,’ I heard her say. ‘I won’t let you.’ A moment’s silence, then, in a louder voice, ‘You can’t stop me. I’ll show you what—’ Suddenly she was awake. She jerked up in the bed, coughing and panting and throwing out her arms. ‘Oh … Oh God …’

  ‘Take it easy,’ I said. ‘You must have had a nightmare.’

  ‘I’m OK.’ She fell back against the pillow and began to breathe more easily. ‘God, I’m sorry. I don’t know … what happened.’

  ‘You were talking in your sleep. Is Jos your husband?’

  ‘I named him?’

  ‘You did.’

  ‘Just goes to show … you can’t get away from some people … as easily as you think. Yes, Jos is my husband. He’d be touched to know, I’m sure, that he was in my thoughts.’

  ‘Are you afraid of him?’

  ‘Why should I be?’

  ‘It sounded as if …’

  ‘He means nothing to me. Not a thing. And he knows that. There’s no reason for me to be afraid of him.’

  ‘But you were dreaming about him.’

  ‘Some sort of automatic guilt mechanism, I expect.’

  ‘It doesn’t seem to have kicked in in my case.’

  ‘It will. And when it does I probably won’t see you for dust.’

  ‘You’re wrong.’

  ‘Am I?’ She’d reached out for me in the dark and was teasing me now, with her fingers as well as her words. ‘Prove it.’

  ‘I can’t. Not yet. But I will.’

  ‘All right. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. Meanwhile, there’s something you can do for my guilt problem.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Take my mind off it.’ She pulled me closer. ‘Any way you like.’

  Early next morning, while Marian was in the bath, I left the hotel and went across to the Café Schwarzenberg on the other side of the road for hot black coffee and a cold-dawn’s-light appraisal of what had happened and what was going to happen. Her husband meant nothing to her, she’d said. But was that true? More to the point, did she mean nothing to him? I’d detected fear in her voice, for all her denials. And I was a threat to him now, whether he knew it or not. Just what was I getting myself into?

  Then there was Faith. Our marriage had been running on empty ever since the accident had thrown my affair with Nicole in her face. I still suspected she’d only patched it together then for Amy’s sake. But Amy was away at boarding school now. And that had largely been Faith’s decision, one that could have been intended to pave the way for a separation. But at a time of her choosing, not mine, and certainly not to make things easier for me. If I tried to turn this into something more than a five-night stand, Faith and I were going to have to acknowledge that we no longer loved each other. And it wasn’t going to be easy.

  Nor was walking away from Marian at the end of my week in Vienna, though. We’d been together for just twenty-four hours, yet already I couldn’t bear the thought of us being apart. A chance in a million, she’d called it. And she’d been right. It was also a chance I knew, soberly and surely, I wasn’t going to let slip.

  ‘I have to take some photographs today,’ I said over breakfast back in her room. ‘The publisher wants the job wrapped up next week.’

  ‘Then you’d better jump to it.’

  ‘Will you come with me?’

  ‘I’d like to. But look what happened at Schönbrunn. Not a lot of pictures.’

  ‘I’ll have to go back there.’

  ‘Why don’t you hire a car? It would give us more time … for other things.’

  ‘My budget won’t run to it.’

  ‘Mine will.’

  ‘Actually, there’s another problem.’ This was how it was bound to be, I knew: the spilling and sharing of secrets, one by one. ‘You remember the accident I told you about? The woman I killed.’

  ‘You never said it was a woman.’

  ‘Didn’t I? Well, it was. And I … I’ve not driven since.’

  ‘You lost your licence?’

  ‘No, no. It wasn’t my fault. At least, not officially, although I’ve often wondered … I lost my nerve, if you want to know the truth. The thought of how easily it happened just wouldn’t go away.’

  ‘Does it upset you to talk about it?’

  ‘Not any more. But, like I told you last night, I’m not very good at forgetting.’

  ‘Some things you have to forget.’ She reached out and touched my cheek with a gentleness that seemed to soothe some wound of her own as well as mine. ‘Sounds like you need a driver. Can I apply for the job?’

  ‘The pay’s lousy, the hours are diabolical and the boss won’t be able to keep his hands off you.’

  ‘I’ll take it, then.’

  So I got to have my cake and eat it, too. Marian hired a smart Mercedes and took me out to the farthest suburbs and beyond, as well as round all the obvious, and some of the not so obvious, photogenic corners of the city. The weather held in finest winter mode and everything went too smoothly to be true. I took some pictures I reckoned I’d be proud of, and Marian and I … Well, what did we do? Fall in love? Develop an addiction to each other? Indulge a seductive compatibility of mind and body? I wouldn’t know what to call it. But I know what it felt like: the real thing, experienced for the first and surely only time.

  ‘You haven’t tried to take my photograph again,’ she goaded as we explored the snowy grave-lined avenues of the Zentralfriedhof, Vienna’s vast central cemetery, halfway through the week that was already accelerating towards its end – and our crisis. ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘You made your views pretty plain on the subject, as I recall.’

  She pouted. ‘But that was before we’d been properly introduced.’

  ‘I’d like to take your picture, Marian. I’d like you to want me to.’

  ‘You talk as if it really matters.’

  ‘I’m a photographer. It’s bound to matter.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Photographs – the best ones – capture the reality of things. And of people.’

  ‘How long have we had them?’

  ‘Photographs? Oh, a hundred and fifty years or so.’

  ‘Who was the first person to have theirs taken?’

  ‘I’m not sure. Fox Talbot’s wife. Or one of his servants at Lacock. Then again, Daguerre might have—’

  ‘Lacock Abbey, near Chippenham?’

  ‘Yes. You know it?’

  ‘I went there once. I … can’t remember much about it.’

  ‘William Fox Talbot invented photography at Lacock during the eighteen thirties. There’s a museum at the house devoted to the subject.’

  ‘It can’t have made much of an impression on me, I’m afraid. Sorry.’

  ‘Never mind.’

  ‘But I’ll make up for it.’ She ran skittishly ahead and turned round, smiling back at me. ‘Take my picture here.’

  ‘Why the sudden conversion?’

  ‘Because half the people in this cemetery must have died before photography was invented. But they were just as real as you and me. Maybe more so.’

  ‘How could they be more so?’ I raised the camera to my eye and stepped to one side, widening the angle to capture the long, pale perspective of bare trees and brooding gravestones beyond Marian, in her blood-red coat. She was grinning at me stubbornly. ‘You’re real enough for me.’

  ‘It’s just that I’m so happy I reckon there’s a good chance I’m dreaming all this.’

  ‘Well, you’re not.’ Her smile was the making of the photograph. It looked so genuine, and yet so glaringly inappropriate in that snow-draped avenue of the Viennese dead. ‘And now we have the proof.’ I took the picture in that instant and felt a ludicrous sense of triumph that she’d allowed me to do it. ‘Thank you, Marian.’<
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  ‘What for?’

  ‘For letting me capture your reality.’

  ‘Oh, you’ve done that all right.’ She was still smiling, more broadly than ever. ‘Didn’t you know?’

  On our last full day together in Vienna, we went out to the Donaupark. From the top of the Danube Tower, its railings bristling with frost, I got some crisp and effective shots of the UNO-City office blocks and an evocative view of Stephansdom’s spire, as distant now as our meeting beneath it seemed. More distant, for sure, than our parting.

  Over lunch in the tower’s revolving restaurant, with Vienna slowly tracking round below us, we each waited for the other to say what had to be said. Eventually, I told myself as well as her, ‘There’s no way I can avoid leaving tomorrow.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I wish—’

  ‘I know that, too.’

  ‘When will you go?’

  ‘I have a flight booked for Friday.’

  ‘And then … we can meet?’

  ‘There’s a problem, Ian.’

  ‘Your husband.’

  ‘Jos wouldn’t …’ She gazed out through the window at the snow-bleached horizon, struggling to compose her thoughts and words. ‘He lets me do much as I please. Like this trip, for instance. But … there are limits.’

  ‘And I’m beyond them?’

  She looked back at me. ‘In England, you would be. He’d feel I was making a fool of him. As I suppose I would be. And that would make him very angry. Which wouldn’t be a good idea. Not at all. Believe me, I know. From bitter experience.’

  ‘Do you have to tell him?’

  ‘Look at me, Ian. What do you see?’

  ‘A beautiful woman.’

  ‘If that’s true, it’s because of you. I wouldn’t have to tell Jos I was having an affair. He’d know at a glance.’

  ‘I’m not going to give you up.’

  ‘I think you may have to. Unless …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s all or nothing, as I see it.’

  ‘I’m ready for that.’

  ‘Are you? What would your wife say? And your daughter?’

  ‘Whatever they wanted to say. It wouldn’t make any difference to me. I’ve made some mistakes in my life, but this wouldn’t be one of them. Come away with me, Marian. We’ll make a clean break of it. A fresh start. Together.’

  ‘Can we really do that?’